Russia's Lost Princesses, BBC Two, review: 'surprising'

The story of the daughters of Tsar Nicholas II was touching, says Serena Davies

Considering their merciless obliteration on July 17, 1918, there is a surprising amount to learn about Russia’s Lost Princesses, not least because they’ve been pored over by a succession of good historians, including Orlando Figes and Douglas Smith. The first episode of BBC Two’s two-part documentary about Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, the four daughters of Tsar Nicholas II, featured both these authors and gave us details as the pitiful English sentences they wrote in pleading notes to their hypochondriac and neglectful mother.

The surviving photographs and scraps of film showed that they were beautiful, too, particularly the second, Tatiana. This didn’t help them however in wooing their parents away from the absurdly preferential treatment the pair gave their only son, the haemophiliac Alexei. The girls were shut off from the world by Nicholas and his wife Alexandra who, fatally, eschewed the affairs of state for the sake of seclusion. The four girls were treated so much as an amorphous unit by their parents that they referred to themselves as Otma, an acronym of their Christian names. It also meant that the freaky, filthy peasant mystic Rasputin (he ate soup with his hands), who penetrated the family’s defences due to Alexandra’s desperation to find a cure for her son, was allowed as alarmingly far as the sisters’ bedrooms.

The girls’ sorry demise will be the subject of next week’s episode, this one set up the disaster. The incidental detail and the sensible academic contributions made a touching tale of lives cast into the crucible of political exigency.